Robert St. John, The War Correspondent Who Hated War
Why a war correspondent if I’m a pacifist? Because I hate war so much and I was very eager to show war as it really is…Everything about war is horrible and what happens to human beings is the most horrible of all.” Robert St. John
Robert St. John was a crusading journalist and an investigative reporter as well as a broadcast journalist and a war correspondent. The newspaper reading public pictured foreign correspondents roaming the world from country to country, sipping coffee in sidewalk cafes, and meeting mysterious blondes in dark, smoky bars. Robert St. John fit this image, especially near the end of his long life. His white flowing hair, moustache and beard made him resemble a Twentieth Century Father Time, which in a sense he was.
He covered countless major news stories, from the 1920s to the 1980s, traveled more than four million miles, and reported from more than 85 countries. Robert St. John started his crusading career early, when he was expelled from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for writing an expose about the college president. He continued his crusading pattern when he used his Cicero Tribune to fight against mobster Al Capone and his gang’s violence and corruption. He spent the last days of his career writing books and stories about Israel.
Robert St. John lived a life full of milestones. Al Capone’s men beat him, the Nazis wounded him in the Balkans, and he lost his NBC job to the Red Scare in the 1950s. He was a pacifist who fought in World War I, reported World War II, and covered five Mideast wars including the 1948, 1956, and 1967 Israeli-Arab conflicts. He became a full time author who wrote 23 books on a manual typewriter using his two finger typing technique. He kept up the pace until he died at age 100, in February 2003.
Robert St. John Grew Up in Oak Park, Illinois
Born in Chicago on March 9, 1902, Robert William St. John grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. His father John was a chemist- a pharmacist in today’s world- who moved his family to Oak Park to escape the squalor of the big city and open a drugstore. Robert and his brother Archer quickly discovered that they lived on the wrong side of the track in the privileged community. “South of the trolley tracks” was light years away from the privileges of the north side where their family doctor, Dr. Hemingway, who had a son named Ernest, lived.
Amy St. John had dreams for her sons. She wanted Archer to become an officer in the Army or Navy, and she wanted Robert to become a minister. The St. John’s suffered a setback when Archer was in an automobile accident. He was thrown from the car and his skull was crushed on a manhole cover. Robert and Archer’s mother Amy, who had been a nurse before she married John St. John, insisted on assisting the surgeon who operated on Archer and saved his life. When John St. John died of cancer in 1917, the family suffered a severe financial setback. Amy returned to nursing, but the family lost the drugstore in Oak Park and one they had owned in Chicago.
In an interview with The Washington Times in 1994, St. John recalled that he took a high school writing class with Ernest Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois, and the teacher kept both after class. According to St. John, their English teacher told them both, “Neither one of you will ever learn to write.”
Robert St. John left school to get a job and eventually at age 16, he lied to the Navy about his age so he could enlist to fight in World War I. He shipped over to France. After he returned from France, he attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and he worked as the campus correspondent for the Hartford Courant. When he wrote exposes about the college president censoring an outspoken English professor, Trinity College expelled him.
Robert St. John Challenged Al Capone
Giving up on formal education, Robert St. John went to work as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago American. In 1923, St. John and his brother founded the Cicero Tribune in suburban Cicero, Illinois, which made Robert St. John, at age 21, the youngest editor-publisher in the United States. He published a series of exposes about gangster Al Capone and his operation of Cicero brothels.
Four of Al Capone’s men waylaid St. John on the way to his office one morning and severely beat him. He complained to the police and the next day Al Capone invited Robert St. John to meet him in person. Al Capone offered St. John money which he rejected and then Capone apologized. He told St. John, "I have always instructed them not to bother newspaper men because the papers give me good advertising for my joints when they write about me."
Since St. John refused to take any of Capone’s bribes, Capone resorted to other measures. Through bribes and treachery, he acquired the ownership of the Cicero Tribune. Robert St. John could not work for Al Capone, so he walked away from the Cicero Tribune without looking back. He accepted a job on a newspaper in Rutland, Vermont, and never returned to Cicero, Illinois.
Robert St. John Reported World War II
After he worked on several other newspapers, Robert St. John joined the Associated Press and covered Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. Then he decided to buy a farm in New Hampshire with his wife, Eda. St. John’s attempts to become a gentleman farmer and write a novel had not been successful and he had isolated himself from the world. When his friend, International News Service reporter Frank Gervasi, came to visit him in the summer of 1938, St. John knew little about the momentous events taking place in Europe.
Frank Gervasi begged St. John not to retire until he had covered the impending war in Europe. Gervasi believed that war would soon break out in Europe, on about September 1, 1939. He urged St. John to come to Europe to work with him as a partner on a daily syndicated column on European affairs.
The St. Johns made arrangements to go to Europe in august 1939, but Gervasi’s plans didn’t materialize. Robert St. John applied at the news service in New York, including The Associated Press, his former employer, but the news agencies told him that at 37, he couldn’t withstand the rigors of being a foreign correspondent.
The St. Johns sailed for Europe even though Robert didn’t have a job, hoping that something would work out in Europe. During the voyage, Robert St. John read that two books that his friend Frank Gervasi gave him to read as background for covering a war in Europe. The two books were Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
The St. Johns landed in Paris, and then traveled onto Hungary. On September 1, 1939, the St. Johns went to a restaurant in Budapest, Hungary, but neither of them could read the menu. Robert went to the Budapest bureau of the Associated Press to find an American who knew enough Hungarian to order lunch. The office was in uproar and when St. John asked what had happened he discovered that the German army had invaded Poland. St. John told the editor that he was a journalist and the editor asked St. John if he could type. When St. John answered yes he could type, the editor hired him immediately. “The Luftwaffe is bombing Warsaw!” his new boss shouted.
From 1939-1941, St. John covered the war in Central Europe and the Balkans for the Associated Press. He experienced the terror and destruction of war, but there were a few light moments. Robert Kaplan described one of those moments when he wrote about Robert St. John and the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest, Romania in his book Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History.
At this point in his career, Robert St. John headed the Associated Press Bureau in Bucharest, and he spent much time at the Athenee Palace Hotel as did many war correspondents, assorted military men, and German soldiers as well. St. John said that “there were seldom less than fifty correspondents housed in the Athenee Palace at any one time.”
Robert St. John Wrote From the Land of Silent People
In the book he wrote a year later about his Balkan experiences, From the Land of Silent People, St. John recalled a far more somber experience in Bucharest, Romania. A Jewish newspaper editor in Bucharest told St. John that he had received a tip that there was going to be a pogrom and that the editor and his family were on the list of people to be rounded up. St. John hid the editor and his family while a Christian fascist group called “The Brotherhood of the Archangel, Michael” captured several hundred Bucharest Jews.
The next morning, St. John discovered what had happened. The Brotherhood of the Archangel Michael took the Jews they had captured to a stockyard at the edge of the city. They stripped the Jews naked and led them up a ramp where cattle were slaughtered. One by one, the Brotherhood of the Archangel Michael members clubbed the Jews and slit their throats. Then their hung their bleeding corpses on meat hooks.
St. John said that that he had to take some of the responsibility for what had happened that night in Bucharest because he was a Christian and the members of the Brotherhood of the Archangel, Michael were Christians. They sang Christian hymns as they killed the Jews. St. John said that he promised himself that if he lived through what was happening in Rumania, if he lived out World War II, he would live out his life “trying to atone for the sins of my group.”
When Hitler’s troops invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, St. John fled from Belgrade with other newsmen. He and the other western journalists tried to follow the retreating Yugoslav government to Sarajevo, but the military situation deteriorated. He next escaped in a small fishing boat for Corfu, just as the Italians overran it. Again barely escaping Axis forces, he traveled across Greece to Crete where the British were preparing to evacuate in the face of German pressure. He rode a Greek troop train and was wounded in the leg by shrapnel.
St. John also tells this story in his book, From the Land of Silent People. Immediately after the air attack on the Greek troop train, St. John spent the night in an overcrowded hospital, recovering from his wounds. As he laid on the floor in the darkness, he heard a child whimpering. When a nurse came by flashing a torch around the room, St. John got up on one elbow and saw where the voice came from. He described the little girl as being about five years old, a pretty child with jet black hair. “But there wasn’t anything pretty about her right arm. It hung in black, tattered shreds.”
What was the girl saying, St. John asked the nurse. The nurse replied that the girl was sobbing for her mother. When he asked why someone hadn’t sent for the little girl’s mother, the nurse replied that her whole family had been killed in that day’s air raid. “I think all the misery of war was wrapped up in that child’s whimpering.”
The next part of St. John’s trip involved a 400 mile trip down the Albanian coast in which he called “a 20-foot sardine boat” with an outboard motor.
During the month that St. John and the other refugee reporters had made their escape, they couldn’t find telephone or wireless instruments to send their stories out to the world. After he safely reached Cairo and Alexandria, St. John and the other reporters had yet another fight on their hands. This time they had to fight the British censors who didn’t want the terrible facts of the Axis victories to be publicized.
Working without notes because he had lost them on the journey, St. John filed his dispatches, made his way to Cape Town, South Africa, and then sailed home to New York. In New York, he sequestered himself in the Roosevelt Hotel. Using his two-finger typing skills and a $7.00 Yugoslavian typewriter that he had carried his entire trip, he began writing “what I saw and smelled and heard.” He called the book that he wrote, From the Land of Silent People, and when Doubleday published it in 1942, it became a best seller.
Robert St. John Broadcast the News of D Day and the End of World War II
When he had finished his book, St. John switched from worked for the Associated Press which did not allow its reporters to write books to broadcast reporting for NBC radio. In 1942, he moved to London and spent a year there reporting on the Nazi bombing and then he came back to work in Washington D.C. and New York.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, St. John broad cast the NBC report about D-Day. “Ladies and gentlemen, we may be approaching a fateful hour. All night long bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin claiming that D-Day is here. One..unconfirmed by Allied sources, of course, says that heavy fighting is taking place between the Germans and invasion forces on the Normandy Peninsula, about 31 miles southwest of Le Havre. St. John broadcast for 117 hours, until it was clear that the D-Day landings had been successful.
In August1945, in the last hours of World War II, Robert St. John demonstrated his steel nerves in NBC’s New York studio. The network usually rang five bells to announce big news and ten for sensational news. In a National Public Radio interview in 2001, St. John remembered that day. He said that he was sitting in the broadcasting booth talking to the entire NBC network when he heard the bells. He stalled until he heard six rings and then he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, World War II is over. The Japanese have agreed to our surrender terms.”
His gamble had earned Robert St. John a 20 second scoop over the other networks. He continued to broadcast an excellent report about the end of the most destructive war in human history. After an hour or so, NBC executives took Robert St. John down the hall for one final task. They wanted him to recap the story for a significantly smaller audience than his radio listeners. Robert St. John announced the end of World War II on television as well as radio.
Later, a colleague asked him what he would have done if the president had been assassinated or some other noteworthy news event had happened. “I would have put on my hat and coat, walked out of that broadcasting booth, out of the NBC newsroom,” he said. “I wouldn’t have even stopped to collect my pay.”
Robert St. John Focused on the Middle East
In 1948, St. John wrote a second book about Yugoslavia, called The Silent People Speak which Doubleday published. In the New York Times Book Review, C.L. Sulzberger suggested that St. John’s reliance on Communist sources made him “a subconscious follower of the ‘party line.’”
His wife and his close friends said that St. John never liked communism, but he became one of 151 writers, performers, directors and others listed in the 1950 Red Channels, an American Business Consultant’s report of communist influence in radio and television.NBC fired St. John. Even after he died, St. John’s second wife, Ruth, whom he married in 1965, insisted he did not like communism.
St. John spent the next 15 years based in Switzerland, and there he reinvented himself once again. The pogrom that St. John had witnessed in Bucharest, Romania, during World War II had created in him a deep and lasting interest in Israel, Jewish issues, and anti-Semitism. This time he focused on the Middle East, and eventually made more than 40 reporting trips to the Middle East. He covered the birth of Israel in 1948, and the Eichmann trial in 1962. He became regarded as a Middle East specialist after covering the war of Israeli independence and Israel’s later wars, including the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. At the time he was 80, by far the oldest of the hundreds of reporters on hand. He was the only one who had covered all four previous Arab-Israeli conflicts.
He wrote eight books about the Middle East, including well accepted biographies of David Ben-Gurion, and Gamel Abdel Nasser. He also wrote Tongue of the Prophets, the first extended study of Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the revival of the Hebrew language. St. John developed an interest in Eliezer Ben Yehuda during one of his stays in Israel. Mrs. Ben Yehuda gave St. John much help as did other scholars and laymen and he wrote an excellent account of Ben Yehuda’s career and a full description of the way Hebrew was transformed from a written language into one of the important modern vernaculars. He also researched around the world for the World Book Encyclopedia and roamed the world to write and broadcast major events on radio or in magazines and books.
“The Living Century”, a documentary series consisting of interviews with outstanding centenarians, was one of the last projects that St. John was involved in before he died. St. John was interviewed for the documentary and provided some insight about why despite the fact he was a pacifist, he became a war correspondent. He said that he hated war so much that he felt compelled to reveal all of its ugliness and its devastating effect on people. Robert St. John was also the Dean of the Directing Faculty of the Career Division of Famous Broadcasters which produced 36 LP records containing home study lessons and a copy of his textbook, Encyclopedia of Radio and Television Broadcasting.
Robert St. John died on February 6, 2003, at age 100, at his home in Waldorf, Maryland. The unfinished manuscript he was currently working on sat on the table beside his bed.
References
Bliss, Edward, Jr. Now the News. Columbia University Press, 1991
Matthews, Anne , Sorel Nancy Caldwell and Spiller, Roger J. Reporting World War II, Part I: American Journalism, 1938-1944. Library of America, 1995.
St. John, Robert. From the Land of Silent People, Doubleday, 1942.
St. John, Robert. The Man Who Played God: A Novel About Hungary and Israel, 1944-1956. Doubleday, 1962.
St. John, Robert. Encyclopedia of Radio & Television Broadcasting. Cathedral Square, 1970.
Robert St. John Biography
Robert St. John – Chicago Tribune
Robert St. John, Peaceful Warrior.- Randolph Holhut
The Essence of War is Death – Randolph Holhut
Obituary, Robert St. John. Seattle Times
Obituary, Robert St. John. New York Times
Video Robert St. John Talking about His Experiences with Al Capone
J Weekly, Obituary, Robert St. John
Why a war correspondent if I’m a pacifist? Because I hate war so much and I was very eager to show war as it really is…Everything about war is horrible and what happens to human beings is the most horrible of all.” Robert St. John
Robert St. John was a crusading journalist and an investigative reporter as well as a broadcast journalist and a war correspondent. The newspaper reading public pictured foreign correspondents roaming the world from country to country, sipping coffee in sidewalk cafes, and meeting mysterious blondes in dark, smoky bars. Robert St. John fit this image, especially near the end of his long life. His white flowing hair, moustache and beard made him resemble a Twentieth Century Father Time, which in a sense he was.
He covered countless major news stories, from the 1920s to the 1980s, traveled more than four million miles, and reported from more than 85 countries. Robert St. John started his crusading career early, when he was expelled from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for writing an expose about the college president. He continued his crusading pattern when he used his Cicero Tribune to fight against mobster Al Capone and his gang’s violence and corruption. He spent the last days of his career writing books and stories about Israel.
Robert St. John lived a life full of milestones. Al Capone’s men beat him, the Nazis wounded him in the Balkans, and he lost his NBC job to the Red Scare in the 1950s. He was a pacifist who fought in World War I, reported World War II, and covered five Mideast wars including the 1948, 1956, and 1967 Israeli-Arab conflicts. He became a full time author who wrote 23 books on a manual typewriter using his two finger typing technique. He kept up the pace until he died at age 100, in February 2003.
Robert St. John Grew Up in Oak Park, Illinois
Born in Chicago on March 9, 1902, Robert William St. John grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. His father John was a chemist- a pharmacist in today’s world- who moved his family to Oak Park to escape the squalor of the big city and open a drugstore. Robert and his brother Archer quickly discovered that they lived on the wrong side of the track in the privileged community. “South of the trolley tracks” was light years away from the privileges of the north side where their family doctor, Dr. Hemingway, who had a son named Ernest, lived.
Amy St. John had dreams for her sons. She wanted Archer to become an officer in the Army or Navy, and she wanted Robert to become a minister. The St. John’s suffered a setback when Archer was in an automobile accident. He was thrown from the car and his skull was crushed on a manhole cover. Robert and Archer’s mother Amy, who had been a nurse before she married John St. John, insisted on assisting the surgeon who operated on Archer and saved his life. When John St. John died of cancer in 1917, the family suffered a severe financial setback. Amy returned to nursing, but the family lost the drugstore in Oak Park and one they had owned in Chicago.
In an interview with The Washington Times in 1994, St. John recalled that he took a high school writing class with Ernest Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois, and the teacher kept both after class. According to St. John, their English teacher told them both, “Neither one of you will ever learn to write.”
Robert St. John left school to get a job and eventually at age 16, he lied to the Navy about his age so he could enlist to fight in World War I. He shipped over to France. After he returned from France, he attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and he worked as the campus correspondent for the Hartford Courant. When he wrote exposes about the college president censoring an outspoken English professor, Trinity College expelled him.
Robert St. John Challenged Al Capone
Giving up on formal education, Robert St. John went to work as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago American. In 1923, St. John and his brother founded the Cicero Tribune in suburban Cicero, Illinois, which made Robert St. John, at age 21, the youngest editor-publisher in the United States. He published a series of exposes about gangster Al Capone and his operation of Cicero brothels.
Four of Al Capone’s men waylaid St. John on the way to his office one morning and severely beat him. He complained to the police and the next day Al Capone invited Robert St. John to meet him in person. Al Capone offered St. John money which he rejected and then Capone apologized. He told St. John, "I have always instructed them not to bother newspaper men because the papers give me good advertising for my joints when they write about me."
Since St. John refused to take any of Capone’s bribes, Capone resorted to other measures. Through bribes and treachery, he acquired the ownership of the Cicero Tribune. Robert St. John could not work for Al Capone, so he walked away from the Cicero Tribune without looking back. He accepted a job on a newspaper in Rutland, Vermont, and never returned to Cicero, Illinois.
Robert St. John Reported World War II
After he worked on several other newspapers, Robert St. John joined the Associated Press and covered Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. Then he decided to buy a farm in New Hampshire with his wife, Eda. St. John’s attempts to become a gentleman farmer and write a novel had not been successful and he had isolated himself from the world. When his friend, International News Service reporter Frank Gervasi, came to visit him in the summer of 1938, St. John knew little about the momentous events taking place in Europe.
Frank Gervasi begged St. John not to retire until he had covered the impending war in Europe. Gervasi believed that war would soon break out in Europe, on about September 1, 1939. He urged St. John to come to Europe to work with him as a partner on a daily syndicated column on European affairs.
The St. Johns made arrangements to go to Europe in august 1939, but Gervasi’s plans didn’t materialize. Robert St. John applied at the news service in New York, including The Associated Press, his former employer, but the news agencies told him that at 37, he couldn’t withstand the rigors of being a foreign correspondent.
The St. Johns sailed for Europe even though Robert didn’t have a job, hoping that something would work out in Europe. During the voyage, Robert St. John read that two books that his friend Frank Gervasi gave him to read as background for covering a war in Europe. The two books were Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
The St. Johns landed in Paris, and then traveled onto Hungary. On September 1, 1939, the St. Johns went to a restaurant in Budapest, Hungary, but neither of them could read the menu. Robert went to the Budapest bureau of the Associated Press to find an American who knew enough Hungarian to order lunch. The office was in uproar and when St. John asked what had happened he discovered that the German army had invaded Poland. St. John told the editor that he was a journalist and the editor asked St. John if he could type. When St. John answered yes he could type, the editor hired him immediately. “The Luftwaffe is bombing Warsaw!” his new boss shouted.
From 1939-1941, St. John covered the war in Central Europe and the Balkans for the Associated Press. He experienced the terror and destruction of war, but there were a few light moments. Robert Kaplan described one of those moments when he wrote about Robert St. John and the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest, Romania in his book Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History.
At this point in his career, Robert St. John headed the Associated Press Bureau in Bucharest, and he spent much time at the Athenee Palace Hotel as did many war correspondents, assorted military men, and German soldiers as well. St. John said that “there were seldom less than fifty correspondents housed in the Athenee Palace at any one time.”
Robert St. John Wrote From the Land of Silent People
In the book he wrote a year later about his Balkan experiences, From the Land of Silent People, St. John recalled a far more somber experience in Bucharest, Romania. A Jewish newspaper editor in Bucharest told St. John that he had received a tip that there was going to be a pogrom and that the editor and his family were on the list of people to be rounded up. St. John hid the editor and his family while a Christian fascist group called “The Brotherhood of the Archangel, Michael” captured several hundred Bucharest Jews.
The next morning, St. John discovered what had happened. The Brotherhood of the Archangel Michael took the Jews they had captured to a stockyard at the edge of the city. They stripped the Jews naked and led them up a ramp where cattle were slaughtered. One by one, the Brotherhood of the Archangel Michael members clubbed the Jews and slit their throats. Then their hung their bleeding corpses on meat hooks.
St. John said that that he had to take some of the responsibility for what had happened that night in Bucharest because he was a Christian and the members of the Brotherhood of the Archangel, Michael were Christians. They sang Christian hymns as they killed the Jews. St. John said that he promised himself that if he lived through what was happening in Rumania, if he lived out World War II, he would live out his life “trying to atone for the sins of my group.”
When Hitler’s troops invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, St. John fled from Belgrade with other newsmen. He and the other western journalists tried to follow the retreating Yugoslav government to Sarajevo, but the military situation deteriorated. He next escaped in a small fishing boat for Corfu, just as the Italians overran it. Again barely escaping Axis forces, he traveled across Greece to Crete where the British were preparing to evacuate in the face of German pressure. He rode a Greek troop train and was wounded in the leg by shrapnel.
St. John also tells this story in his book, From the Land of Silent People. Immediately after the air attack on the Greek troop train, St. John spent the night in an overcrowded hospital, recovering from his wounds. As he laid on the floor in the darkness, he heard a child whimpering. When a nurse came by flashing a torch around the room, St. John got up on one elbow and saw where the voice came from. He described the little girl as being about five years old, a pretty child with jet black hair. “But there wasn’t anything pretty about her right arm. It hung in black, tattered shreds.”
What was the girl saying, St. John asked the nurse. The nurse replied that the girl was sobbing for her mother. When he asked why someone hadn’t sent for the little girl’s mother, the nurse replied that her whole family had been killed in that day’s air raid. “I think all the misery of war was wrapped up in that child’s whimpering.”
The next part of St. John’s trip involved a 400 mile trip down the Albanian coast in which he called “a 20-foot sardine boat” with an outboard motor.
During the month that St. John and the other refugee reporters had made their escape, they couldn’t find telephone or wireless instruments to send their stories out to the world. After he safely reached Cairo and Alexandria, St. John and the other reporters had yet another fight on their hands. This time they had to fight the British censors who didn’t want the terrible facts of the Axis victories to be publicized.
Working without notes because he had lost them on the journey, St. John filed his dispatches, made his way to Cape Town, South Africa, and then sailed home to New York. In New York, he sequestered himself in the Roosevelt Hotel. Using his two-finger typing skills and a $7.00 Yugoslavian typewriter that he had carried his entire trip, he began writing “what I saw and smelled and heard.” He called the book that he wrote, From the Land of Silent People, and when Doubleday published it in 1942, it became a best seller.
Robert St. John Broadcast the News of D Day and the End of World War II
When he had finished his book, St. John switched from worked for the Associated Press which did not allow its reporters to write books to broadcast reporting for NBC radio. In 1942, he moved to London and spent a year there reporting on the Nazi bombing and then he came back to work in Washington D.C. and New York.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, St. John broad cast the NBC report about D-Day. “Ladies and gentlemen, we may be approaching a fateful hour. All night long bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin claiming that D-Day is here. One..unconfirmed by Allied sources, of course, says that heavy fighting is taking place between the Germans and invasion forces on the Normandy Peninsula, about 31 miles southwest of Le Havre. St. John broadcast for 117 hours, until it was clear that the D-Day landings had been successful.
In August1945, in the last hours of World War II, Robert St. John demonstrated his steel nerves in NBC’s New York studio. The network usually rang five bells to announce big news and ten for sensational news. In a National Public Radio interview in 2001, St. John remembered that day. He said that he was sitting in the broadcasting booth talking to the entire NBC network when he heard the bells. He stalled until he heard six rings and then he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, World War II is over. The Japanese have agreed to our surrender terms.”
His gamble had earned Robert St. John a 20 second scoop over the other networks. He continued to broadcast an excellent report about the end of the most destructive war in human history. After an hour or so, NBC executives took Robert St. John down the hall for one final task. They wanted him to recap the story for a significantly smaller audience than his radio listeners. Robert St. John announced the end of World War II on television as well as radio.
Later, a colleague asked him what he would have done if the president had been assassinated or some other noteworthy news event had happened. “I would have put on my hat and coat, walked out of that broadcasting booth, out of the NBC newsroom,” he said. “I wouldn’t have even stopped to collect my pay.”
Robert St. John Focused on the Middle East
In 1948, St. John wrote a second book about Yugoslavia, called The Silent People Speak which Doubleday published. In the New York Times Book Review, C.L. Sulzberger suggested that St. John’s reliance on Communist sources made him “a subconscious follower of the ‘party line.’”
His wife and his close friends said that St. John never liked communism, but he became one of 151 writers, performers, directors and others listed in the 1950 Red Channels, an American Business Consultant’s report of communist influence in radio and television.NBC fired St. John. Even after he died, St. John’s second wife, Ruth, whom he married in 1965, insisted he did not like communism.
St. John spent the next 15 years based in Switzerland, and there he reinvented himself once again. The pogrom that St. John had witnessed in Bucharest, Romania, during World War II had created in him a deep and lasting interest in Israel, Jewish issues, and anti-Semitism. This time he focused on the Middle East, and eventually made more than 40 reporting trips to the Middle East. He covered the birth of Israel in 1948, and the Eichmann trial in 1962. He became regarded as a Middle East specialist after covering the war of Israeli independence and Israel’s later wars, including the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. At the time he was 80, by far the oldest of the hundreds of reporters on hand. He was the only one who had covered all four previous Arab-Israeli conflicts.
He wrote eight books about the Middle East, including well accepted biographies of David Ben-Gurion, and Gamel Abdel Nasser. He also wrote Tongue of the Prophets, the first extended study of Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the revival of the Hebrew language. St. John developed an interest in Eliezer Ben Yehuda during one of his stays in Israel. Mrs. Ben Yehuda gave St. John much help as did other scholars and laymen and he wrote an excellent account of Ben Yehuda’s career and a full description of the way Hebrew was transformed from a written language into one of the important modern vernaculars. He also researched around the world for the World Book Encyclopedia and roamed the world to write and broadcast major events on radio or in magazines and books.
“The Living Century”, a documentary series consisting of interviews with outstanding centenarians, was one of the last projects that St. John was involved in before he died. St. John was interviewed for the documentary and provided some insight about why despite the fact he was a pacifist, he became a war correspondent. He said that he hated war so much that he felt compelled to reveal all of its ugliness and its devastating effect on people. Robert St. John was also the Dean of the Directing Faculty of the Career Division of Famous Broadcasters which produced 36 LP records containing home study lessons and a copy of his textbook, Encyclopedia of Radio and Television Broadcasting.
Robert St. John died on February 6, 2003, at age 100, at his home in Waldorf, Maryland. The unfinished manuscript he was currently working on sat on the table beside his bed.
References
Bliss, Edward, Jr. Now the News. Columbia University Press, 1991
Matthews, Anne , Sorel Nancy Caldwell and Spiller, Roger J. Reporting World War II, Part I: American Journalism, 1938-1944. Library of America, 1995.
St. John, Robert. From the Land of Silent People, Doubleday, 1942.
St. John, Robert. The Man Who Played God: A Novel About Hungary and Israel, 1944-1956. Doubleday, 1962.
St. John, Robert. Encyclopedia of Radio & Television Broadcasting. Cathedral Square, 1970.
Robert St. John Biography
Robert St. John – Chicago Tribune
Robert St. John, Peaceful Warrior.- Randolph Holhut
The Essence of War is Death – Randolph Holhut
Obituary, Robert St. John. Seattle Times
Obituary, Robert St. John. New York Times
Video Robert St. John Talking about His Experiences with Al Capone
J Weekly, Obituary, Robert St. John